191–200 of 1001 posts
It still blows my mind how the landings are more exciting than the launches.
I'm completely mind-blown that not only can they do this, but we get 1080p video for almost the whole time. What cameras do they have that can look at something 30 KM up in the air that well?
Anyone knows how the landing is guided? Is it just really precise GPS/altimeter or does it use computer vision?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main difference is that this is built by a private corporation who can't afford to throw money away, while the Space Shuttle was build by the government, and moreover it had to fulfill a number of conflicting requirements, and commercial profit was not one of them. But on a more technical level. I think the vertical landing is the main difference. Vertical landing was obviously known and done by NASA, this is how…
Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer. Approved by a person whose last act was this approval before leaving NASA and joining Spacex (effectively putting money in their own pocket). It is also yet to be seen how Starship will ever be profitable (outside of spending government money), who is going to pay for those launches and for what purpose. Other than S…
Video of the catch > Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster! https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011
Naive question: I obviously expect there to be flames from the engines, but there were flames on the lower sides for quite a while after the catch – is that expected?
[stub for offtopicness]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The main difference is that this is built by a private corporation who can't afford to throw money away, while the Space Shuttle was build by the government, and moreover it had to fulfill a number of conflicting requirements, and commercial profit was not one of them. But on a more technical level. I think the vertical landing is the main difference. Vertical landing was obviously known and done by NASA, this is how…
Spacex might be a private company, but this project is funded by NASA, meaning the American taxpayer. Approved by a person whose last act was this approval before leaving NASA and joining Spacex (effectively putting money in their own pocket). It is also yet to be seen how Starship will ever be profitable (outside of spending government money), who is going to pay for those launches and for what purpose. Other than S…
So was the space shuttle, so that's not a difference between the launch costs of the two vehicles.
Nothing could have prepared me for how that catch looked. I was sure the rocket was careening into the tower at the last second before it straightened out. The control algorithms must be incredible for the landing system to work within those small tolerances.
MIMO and nonlinear control theories are probably some of the hardest topics in all of engineering. SpaceX control system also has to compensate for the fuel moving inside their rockets so the control algorithms probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation. Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-…
I'm just so happy to see this level of progress. This another big step for opening up space. To think that one day this will be considered normal. 150 Metric tons sent on a fully reusable rocket. Thats like a 747 to space.
So, reusable is supposed to reduce the cost. But the space shuttle was reusable and it has been shutdown because it was too expensive. What is the differences between the two?
It's difficult to overstate how important the milestone of catching the booster is. Now we have a reusable rocket an order of magnitude larger than anything we've had before, and the cost of kg to orbit just nosedived.